July 6, 1945—Col.
Denis Cuthbert Capel-Dunn died in a plane crash with other officials
following the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations. But
this functionary in Britain’s Intelligence Corps, who otherwise would have been
forgotten in histories written after WWII, was assured of immortality—albeit of
a dubious kind—when he became the model for the villain of an epic novel series
by subordinate Anthony Powell.
Powell (whose name was pronounced “Pole”) owed more
than his literary career to Capel-Dunn; he owed him his life. Had his boss not
sacked him, Powell may well have joined him on that fateful flight.
A Dance to the Music of Time featured more than 300
characters, but the one who provides a compulsive focus is Kenneth Widmerpool,
the character based on Capel-Dunn. When glimpsed initially in the first novel
in the sequence, A Question of Upbringing
(1951), Widmerpool is an adolescent schoolboy ridiculed for wearing “the wrong
kind of overcoat.” Thereafter he always seems uncomfortable in his own skin—and
compensates by outworking and outscheming everyone he sees as his better.
Seldom has a fictional man on the make been rendered
as so patently absurd—or so dangerous to run afoul of. Winderpool’s the near-sighted, fat dork you
laughed at in school, only now he’s in a position where he can make your life
miserable—even get you killed. (Literally:
his lack of support for the Polish underground at a critical juncture winds
up resulting in the death of one of those old school chums.)
In length, ambition and subject matter, Dance is a close match to another
British multi-novel sequence, C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers.
Both feature first-person narrators in an extended bildungsroman of emotional development and physical decline, from
the 1920s to the late 1960s. Both are heavily influenced by Marcel Proust. Both focus, at one point or another, on
bureaucrats in WWII and the postwar era, in what Snow called (in a term he
popularized) the “corridors of power.”
But there is one important difference. The major
bureaucrat of Strangers and Brothers is the narrator of the novels, Lewis
Eliot, a lawyer who, after relating his own early disappointments and sorrows,
earns reader trust and sympathy. The narrator of Dance is Nicholas Jenkins, a novelist who looks askance at the one
character who, besides himself, figures throughout the 12-novel sequence:
Widmerpool.
The unhappy experience of Powell during the war resembled
that of his slightly older (two years) contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, who, after an initial burst of patriotism at the
outbreak of war, came to abominate military life as “tedious and futile and
fatiguing.” Waugh’s war-weariness found expression in his Sword of Honor trilogy,
which many critics have hailed as among the finest work of his career.
Powell’s novels of his wartime experience constitute
the third “movement” of his sequence. Widmerpool has already appeared off and
on in earlier novels, and when Jenkins encounters him again, 20 years after his first appearance (still,
significantly, in clothes uncomfortable for his overweight frame) as his new
commanding officer, he is so delighted at this presence of a past that had once
seemed forever lost that he wonders about “the disobliging light that seemed so
innate since we had been at school together.”
After their interview, Jenkins knows he was right to
feel what he had earlier, sensing that he is “now in Widmerpool’s power,” which
understandably gives him “a disagreeable, sinking feeling within.”
Simon Russell Beale, who played Widmerpool in the 1997 British mini-series (including as a schoolboy, in the image accompanying this post), reputedly bore something of a resemblance to Capel-Dunn. This will give contemporary readers a flavor of the real-life original, described by a mutual acquaintance of his and Powell’s as “a very fat, extremely boring, overwhelmingly ambitious arriviste.”
While Capel-Dunn died at the end of the war, Powell
allowed his fictional creation to carry on for another quarter-century. The novelist
chafed at readers’ tendencies to ascribe all actions of a character to a
real-life person, and we can see how he rebelled against these in this
instance.
Powell's overriding aim continued to be to imagine how Capel-Dunn might have found himself in new circumstances after the war, but he may well have drawn on other real-life individuals to fill out this portrait—including a Labour MP who had served covertly as a Soviet Army Intelligence agent before the war, then expelled by Labour in the 1950s for his Stalinism.
Widmerpool represented forces of social upheaval deeply lamented by the conservative Powell, who satirizes throughout as a continual ideological chameleon: businessman, confidante of Wallis Simpson, war bureaucrat, Labour Party MP under Clement Attlee, Soviet spy, editor of a left-wing magazine, university chancellor, counterculture supporter. His is the worst form of faddism that Powell could imagine, and he has become a byword since for ruthless ambition lacking in any fixed belief.
Though John Mortimer's Rapstone Chronicles features a Thatcher-era conservative, Leslie Titmuss, rather than a Labour Party figure as its villain, even that trilogy tips its hat to Powell. A Labour Party candidate late in the series is named Terry Flitton, bearing the same surname as the dangerous beauty who becomes Widmerpool's wife, Pamela Flitton.
Powell's overriding aim continued to be to imagine how Capel-Dunn might have found himself in new circumstances after the war, but he may well have drawn on other real-life individuals to fill out this portrait—including a Labour MP who had served covertly as a Soviet Army Intelligence agent before the war, then expelled by Labour in the 1950s for his Stalinism.
Widmerpool represented forces of social upheaval deeply lamented by the conservative Powell, who satirizes throughout as a continual ideological chameleon: businessman, confidante of Wallis Simpson, war bureaucrat, Labour Party MP under Clement Attlee, Soviet spy, editor of a left-wing magazine, university chancellor, counterculture supporter. His is the worst form of faddism that Powell could imagine, and he has become a byword since for ruthless ambition lacking in any fixed belief.
Though John Mortimer's Rapstone Chronicles features a Thatcher-era conservative, Leslie Titmuss, rather than a Labour Party figure as its villain, even that trilogy tips its hat to Powell. A Labour Party candidate late in the series is named Terry Flitton, bearing the same surname as the dangerous beauty who becomes Widmerpool's wife, Pamela Flitton.
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